Will Cain on Monticello and slavery, 7/11/22
Citation From the July 11, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Will Cain Podcast
WILL CAIN (HOST): But for now, story number one. There's an article in The New York Post this week that reflects many tourists who have visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's ancestral home, have come away with a different lesson than the one they expected. Perhaps some of the tourists who visited Monticello might be expecting a lesson in the foundation of the United States of America — the history of a man who helped develop the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
Instead what they came away with, according to the New York Post, was a lesson in anti-racism. At the forefront of Thomas Jefferson's story, instead of the foundation of the United States of America was the fact that he participated in the abhorrent tradition of slavery. Getting almost equal billing, according to many of these tourists, to Thomas Jefferson was the role in his story of Sally Hemings, the slave with whom it's suspected he fathered something like six children.
Now, if we are to suggest that the story of Thomas Jefferson is a story of slavery, well, then we are suggesting that the invasion of Normandy was a story of sexism. Let me explain. Slavery is an abhorrent human tradition dating back centuries. It was practiced by virtually every civilization up through the 1800s. Slavery has been practiced in Africa among African tribes. It still is to this day among many African tribes. Slavery was practiced in the United States of America, then the Americas, by the American Indian tribes. Whenever there was a battle, say, between the Comanches and the Apaches, it was a long-held tradition that if you did not scalp, impale, and disembowel your enemy, you would take his wife and his children as slaves. Slavery is today practiced in the Middle East. Still today, slavery is practiced in the Middle East. Now, that is to say that slavery has been a constant in human history, not a virtue, most definitely a vice, but most certainly a constant. There are stories in Biblical history about slavery of the Israelites by the Egyptians.
You simply cannot find a moment in history where we arrived at an enlightened position that every human being was recognized for their equal value — that is, until the foundation of the United States of America. Now it escapes no one's attention that those eternal principles that we codified, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution, that all men are created equal, was not practiced here in the United States. We were foundational hypocrites. But our hypocrisy doesn't undercut that principle developed over millennia and codified for the first time on these shores. Our hypocrisy does not undercut the truism of the principle that all men are created equal.
What I'm getting at is the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves does not make him unique. When you tell someone's story, of course, you're going to discuss the traits that might have been common to his generation, to his era, to his culture. But that would be a fairly shallow and certainly not individualized story of whatever subject you're hoping to profile. If you were hoping to tell someone's story, you would talk about what makes that person unique. What makes that person different? You wouldn't simply describe someone physically as, well, he looked like everyone else in the world in that day. No. If in fact, he had a peg leg, you would say he has a peg leg. In the analogy of Thomas Jefferson, understanding eternal principles discussed as we've talked about together through Greek philosophy, Roman tradition, Judeo-Christian morality — begun with the Magna Carta and enshrined in the United States' founding document was the historical peg leg. It is the story of Thomas Jefferson. It's what makes him unique.
It is not to say that we ignore the ills of any individual or certainly any society because they are common. But we have to put them into the context of their commonality. Yes, we point out their sins, and yes, most certainly we point out their hypocrisy. It is part of Thomas Jefferson's story that he owned slaves. It is part of Thomas Jefferson's story that he had the cognitive dissonance to write, "We recognize that all men are created equal" while not applying that to Black Americans. It's part of his story, but it is not his story. If it were his story, it would be a story: Well, they all looked like this in that era.
What makes Jefferson and Franklin and Madison and Hamilton unique was that they founded this most successful revolutionary experiment in humankind, and they did it not through a haphazard, slapdash brainstorming session, but through three-months-plus of hashing out. Shall we protect this right? Shall we limit the government to these functions? In short, the peg leg that is Jefferson and Franklin and Washington and Adams was the historically unique signifier. And I'm not talking about of a few decades either way. I'm not talking about unique from 1740 to 1830. I'm talking about unique over centuries. To then turn it into a story of slavery is to only look at history through the lens of 2022.
According to some, the tourists at Monticello reported on by the New York Post, they felt like when talking to tour guides, the conversation was always spun to Jefferson's negatives, always spun to racism. They painted a picture quoting The New York Post, quote, that all our Founding Fathers were immoral creatures that happened to create a country. Every tour guide, pivoting to Sally Hemings, every single opportunity, including the gift shop through which you exit an opportunity to talk about racism. Ibram X. Kendi's book, How To Be An Anti-Racist, on sale at Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello.
If this is the story of Thomas Jefferson, as I mentioned, then we would need to look back at the invasion of Normandy. We could watch the movie of Saving Private Ryan and say, Wow, they really missed the boat. The real story of the invasion of Normandy is the fact that our military was segregated. It was segregated based upon racial and gender lines. And for that matter, if we're truly being inclusive, there really wasn't a good trans representation among the Marines that stormed the beaches of Normandy. That's the story of D-Day.
Of course, you and I know that is obscenely insane. Yes, maybe the United States had or most definitely the United States had a segregated military in the 1930s and 40s. Yes, white and Black men and women – no one even conceived of the idea of trans – were all segregated. But that's not the story of men marching into Nazi bullets, dying row upon row in the waters of the Atlantic, until they could amass enough force to storm the hills of German pillboxes and take those machine guns and then take the beach and then take Europe to destroy Nazi fascism.
Of course, that is not a story about the fact that the United States of America had not yet integrated its military. Because that's not what made the United States military unique, but we don't apply that same obvious common sense rationale when it comes to the Founders, when it comes to slavery, when it comes to racism.
This isn't an argument to forgive the founders. It certainly isn't an argument to ignore the ills and the sins of the founders. But it is an argument to ask for just the slightest bit of historical competency, to put something into context, to understand the world beyond the lens of your latest H.R. training. It is to ask, what is it that made them unique? What is it that makes us unique? What is it that makes any story unique? And if we come back to the story of Jefferson and we think that what makes it unique is that he hadn't sufficiently internalized the lessons of Ibram X. Kendi. If it is that he hadn't read How To Be An Anti-Racist, is it that he committed a sin that had been committed for thousands of years? Then you simply don't know much about history. Then we simply do not know much about the United States of America. We'll be right back with more of The Will Cain Podcast.